NEWS & UPDATES

Kuching, Tuesday 2 July 2013 – Sarawak Energy today confirmed its earlier findings that the power outage that occurred at 17.36pm on 27th June, originated from Bakun.

At the time of occurrence, it was reported that the Kemena-Bintulu transmission line had tripped. With limited information available at that point of time, we were not able to sufficiently analyse the cause. However, we now have clear evidence to show that the total system blackout in Sarawak was due to unexpected and serious drop of power supply from Bakun Hydroelectric Plant. Our data shows that the three Bakun units tripped at about the same time. These three units had approximately 650MW of load before the incident. The frequency drop created by the tripping of the three units led to the shutdown of all our power stations – Sejingkat in Kuching, Batang Ai, Mukah Coal Plant, as well as Bintulu and Miri gas plants. Subsequently, it also led to the tripping of the transmission line.

To recap, within 10 minutes after the incident occurred, we initiated the Blackout Restoration Plan to start-up all the generation plants with the following results - Batang Ai HEP (restarted at 5.53pm), Tun Abdul Rahman Power Station (restarted at 5.56pm), Bintulu Power Station (restarted at 6.21pm) and Miri (restarted at 7.45pm). Bakun was synchronized to the grid at 9.46pm.

Sarawak Energy is committed to serve its customers, be it residential or business communities in ensuring uninterrupted power supply. We will work closely with Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd to identify the root-cause that led to the fault at Bakun.

"We are focused on finding the solution together with Sarawak Hidro in ensuring that the operations of Bakun, being the independent power producer maintain its global standards.  We would also like to be transparent in our findings to ensure that the public is also kept informed of the actions taken by Sarawak Energy. Therefore, we will also be sharing soon on the restoration (recovery) process", said Torstein Dale Sjotveit, Chief Executive Officer, Sarawak Energy Berhad.